Second-guessing the SEALs

YOU'VE just fought your way into a dark room in Abbottabad. The most wanted man on the planet is glowing green in the cross-hairs of your rifle scope. Though he is apparently unarmed, he makes no gestures of surrender. Is he wired with explosives beneath his pajamas? Is he about to trigger an unseen bomb that could level the house? And you have a nanosecond to make the kill decision. What would you do? I'd pull the trigger. Yet, some folks (albeit a minority) are still wringing their hands over the conjecture that Osama bin Laden was "unarmed" when the SEAL Team Six shooter took him out. Ergo, killing him was illegal or immoral. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers retires this argument rather neatly:

"What drives me crazy in the rush to proclaim bin Laden "un-armed" is that there is no way the SEALs could have known whether he was armed. Bin Laden said repeatedly that he would rather be killed than captured, and Al Qaeda loves suicide bombing, favoring explosive vests and other clothing. Bin Laden not having a gun in his hand did not prove that he was not armed: planners had to assume that either he, his room, or the entire building was rigged to explode and that bin Laden only needed to activate a switch. Unless he actively surrendered (in which case international rules of war would kick in), operators had to assume that he was about to blow them all up."

Hence, the quick "double tap." None of us were in that dark room. We'll never know the exact decision-making processes that led to bin Laden's killing. Yes, taking human life is almost always morally ambiguous. But in this case, I can live with that fact.